


All the Stupid Things You Do

by Mireille



Category: Avengers Assemble (Cartoon)
Genre: M/M, ridiculous fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:07:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23376628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mireille/pseuds/Mireille
Summary: The UST in the room is thick enough to cut with a knife. Scott's about to make his move. And then Hulk needs a sandwich.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Scott Lang
Comments: 11
Kudos: 64





	All the Stupid Things You Do

**Author's Note:**

> So, I normally have this meticulously planned-out posting schedule where I don't post more than one fic a week (or one fic + one chapter of a serially-posted fic), and I spread out my pairings/fandoms/etc...
> 
> But everybody's stuck at home and bored, and so I'm posting all the ready-to-post fic I had queued up. (Everyone will still be bored in two weeks, too, but... it's a flimsy justification, but it's mine.

****

"Doesn't SHIELD make agents learn self-defense?" Scott asked, tearing open another alcohol wipe and dabbing at the blood on Clint's face. "If not, can we maybe sign you up for a class at a community center?"

"I know how to defend myself," Clint grumbled. "Don't we have any real ice packs?" He shifted to a more comfortable position on the table and moved the towel-wrapped bag of frozen peas away from his bruised wrist. 

"Not that I could find. Shut up and put those peas on your face." He pressed a butterfly bandage to the cut just above Clint's eyebrow. They'd stayed behind in the common area after Cap had debriefed them, once the others had gone their separate ways, so that Clint could get cleaned up. 

Everyone else had come through this latest fight against MODOK just fine, without even a scratch. Clint, on the other hand, looked like he'd been renting himself out as a punching bag. Nothing was serious enough to require medical attention, but Clint's face was going to be black and blue for a while, and the swelling at his wrist would have to go down before he could pick up his bow again. 

Scott wasn't sure how he'd ended up on medic duty--

No, he was sure. He'd volunteered because it was Clint, and somebody needed to take care of the idiot. 

Since Scott was a lot fonder of that particular idiot than he'd gotten around to mentioning, it had seemed natural to volunteer. 

Clint hadn't argued, either, which felt very encouraging. 

"I don't know how you managed to get yourself beaten up like this," Scott added, as he moved on to the blood on Clint's chin from his split lip. "It's MODOK, it's not like he can hit you." 

"Explosion," Clint mumbled, or at least Scott thought that was what he said. Between his lip and the bag of peas on the side of his face, he couldn't be completely sure. 

"Nobody mentioned that he was using explosives." MODOK was a technopath; it made sense that he could use his mind to blow things up if he wanted to, but that was the kind of thing that, in general, Iron Man or Captain America kept the rest of them advised of. 

Clint mumbled something else, not making eye contact with Scott. 

"What was that?" There, all the blood was off Clint's face now. He could turn his attention to wrapping up Clint's wrist and then putting it in a sling to keep him from using it and making things worse. 

Clint took the peas away from his mouth. "He blew up my exploding arrows. I had enough warning to get them out of my quiver, but..." 

But multiple small explosions in Clint's general area meant that there had been debris falling on him. "You're a moron," Scott said as he wound an Ace bandage around Clint's wrist, maybe a little tighter than was strictly called for. 

"A complete moron," he went on. "You went in to face off against MODOK with exploding arrows in your quiver? Cap sent you in because you're low-tech." 

That was why the teams that had gone in to confront MODOK directly had been Cap and Clint, and then Thor and Hulk. Natasha was good at hand-to-hand combat, but relied pretty heavily on her sting bracelets, and Tony, Sam, and Scott himself were dependent on technology. 

"I'm not a moron," Clint argued. "I didn't think about having them on me. I wasn't planning to use them. Also, ow, that bandage is too tight." 

Scott rewrapped it quickly. "Is that better?" 

"A little." 

Scott hadn't taken his hand away from Clint's arm; his fingers were resting lightly on the skin just above the bandage. He wondered if Clint would say something about that. 

He wondered whether, if Clint _did_ say something about it, it would be to ask Scott to take his hand away. 

"Keep the ice pack on," Scott said, rubbing his thumb over the softer skin of Clint's inner forearm. "You should probably get another one. I think there's a bag of corn in the freezer." 

"Why do we even have vegetables in the freezer anyway?" 

That was a fair question. None of them were big on cooking. It wasn't that they ate junk food all the time. A lot of the time, maybe, but not all the time. They just got food delivered a lot, and people who wanted vegetables tended to go for baby carrots and salads rather than cooking up a bag of frozen peas. 

They made good ice packs, though. 

Scott laughed. "Probably because someone realized you were going to get hit in the face a lot." He finally let go of Clint's arm so he could pack the supplies back into the first aid kit. 

Clint pouted up at him. Actually _pouted_ , with his lower lip poking out even further than the swelling would have accounted for. 

It was ridiculous. 

It was adorable. 

What the hell, he was going for it. It wasn't like he was in doubt about the amount of unresolved sexual tension in the room. His only doubts came from whether or not Clint was interested in actually resolving it, and he'd know that soon enough. 

Scott had just leaned in, carefully aiming for the corner of Clint's mouth that wasn't bruised, bleeding, and covered in a bag of frozen peas, when the floor shook.

That meant one of two things, and a glance to his right confirmed that it wasn't an earthquake. 

"There'd better be pizza bagels," Hulk muttered as he yanked open the freezer door. 

"Well," Clint said, "I'm going to go lie down with a bag of peas on my face. Toss me the bag of corn, Hulk? I need to ice my wrist, too." 

"Did you eat the pizza bagels?" Hulk pulled out the bag of corn, considered it for a minute, and then flung it in Clint's direction. 

Clint caught it easily even with his left hand. "What? No," he said. "It was probably Tony. He was in the lab late last night, and you know he likes a midnight snack." 

Hulk growled something indecipherable and opened the refrigerator. "Where's the milk?" 

"No idea," Clint said quickly. Scott hoped he didn't sound as guilty to Hulk as he did to Scott. "Thanks for the corn. And thanks for helping patch me up, Ant-Man." He slid down from the table, and a moment later, he and his frozen vegetables were gone. 

Scott finished putting away the first aid kit and cleaning up the wrappers from the bandages he'd used on Clint. Hulk had apparently gotten over the lack of pizza bagels; he was pulling things seemingly at random out of the refrigerator and stacking them on the counter. 

There was no point getting annoyed at him for interrupting, Scott told himself. Hulk had no way of knowing that there had been a Moment going on. 

He wouldn't have cared if he had, but that was beside the point. _Not_ beside the point was that getting annoyed at Hulk could lead to getting lightly smashed. 

It wasn't like that was going to be Scott's only chance. Clint got beaten up at least twice a month. 

Not that he needed to wait for that to make his move. Clint had said he was going to lie down with his ice packs. Scott could go find him in his room. He needed to bring Clint that sling anyway.

Scott's plans for the rest of the day weren't ruined at all. In fact, it'd probably be better for him and Clint to have this conversation in Clint's room than in the kitchen. 

Hulk might have done him a favor. Not that Scott was going to tell him that.

****

Scott's plans for the rest of the day were totally ruined. 

Clint was either not in his room--though where else he would have gone, Scott had no idea--or just wasn't answering the door. Probably because he'd realized where things were heading with Scott, and the interruption had given him a chance to overthink things. 

Or to think about them at all, but Scott was still reasonably certain that Clint was both into him and okay with being into men. This smelled of too much thinking about how it could go wrong, not of lack of interest.

Scott knocked several times, with no luck at all, before he gave up. He could ask JARVIS where Clint was, and JARVIS would tell him unless Clint had specifically asked him not to. That felt like cheating, though. 

He could get back to his lab and send some of his ants to look for Clint. That _didn't_ feel like cheating. That was using his own skills and technology to solve a problem, rather than relying on Tony's AI butler. 

As he passed by the kitchen again, he saw Hulk through the open door, taking a bite of an absurdly huge sandwich, the kind Scott had always thought only existed in cartoons. 

This was all Hulk's fault, he decided, even though he knew he'd already decided that it wasn't. 

Before his common sense could kick in and try to save his neck, Scott was already in the kitchen. "What the hell, Hulk?" he heard himself yelling. 

Hulk didn't even put down his sandwich. "What's your problem, little bug?" 

"You! This! For pete's sake, can't I get five minutes alone with Clint without you stomping in here yelling about pizza bagels? I was trying to have an important conversation with him, but oh, no, Hulk's mad because we ran out of milk. Tell JARVIS to order more, and get over it! There's a time and a place!"

The kitchen probably was the place, Scott realized, a split second before he realized he'd just been yelling at the Hulk, which wasn't his smartest move. 

To his relief, Hulk didn't hit him. Not that it had been likely; Hulk did generally save his fists for Thor, who could handle it, but Scott had still been a little worried. 

Around a mouthful of sandwich, Hulk said, "The fridge is here. You talk somewhere else." 

"Yeah, okay," Scott admitted, "but the point is, that conversation was happening here, and it was at a very delicate stage, and _learn to read the damn room, Hulk_!" 

Then he heard a snort of laughter from behind him and turned to see Clint leaning against the doorway. "You might want to find somewhere else to be before Hulk decides he's offended by that," he said, grinning at Scott. 

Scott wished he had his Ant-Man suit on. The helmet would have hidden how red he could feel his face turning.

But Clint did make a good point, and Hulk _was_ giving him a dirty look. "Hate reading," Hulk muttered, and Scott decided that now was a good time to leave.

Clint was still laughing when Scott joined him in the hall. "I can't believe you just told Hulk to read the room." 

"I can't believe that's what you're focusing on," Scott said. "If you're going to mock me, there are a lot more targets, aren't there?"

"I don't know, are there? The only thing I heard was you yelling 'learn to read the damn room, Hulk!'" He started walking, and Scott followed him even if he had no idea where they were going. 

"You don't have your ice packs," he said, because that was a safer topic of conversation. 

"Yeah, I was on my way to the gym to find a clean towel to wrap around the corn," he said. "Now, what did I miss? I hate knowing there's something I could tease you about, if only I knew what it was." 

Scott had intended to talk to Clint, after all. He might as well do it now. "I was yelling at him for interrupting us," he said. 

"He didn't interrupt," Clint said. "Everything's bandaged. I mean, my ribs hurt, but they don't feel broken, so they don't need anything." 

He stopped walking, putting his hand on Clint's arm to stop him as well. "I was talking about the fact that I was about to kiss you right before Hulk stomped in yelling about pizza bagels." 

Clint frowned. "You weren't," he said. 

"I was." 

"I didn't know that." 

"Yeah, well, if Hulk had come in fifteen seconds later, you'd have known. Blame it on him." 

Clint burst out laughing, and Scott wished again that he had his suit on so that he could shrink down to invisibility and disappear. 

"Nice, Hawkeye," he said. "'Thanks but no thanks' would work. You don't have to--"

But then Clint managed to get words out, and the knots in Scott's stomach loosened a little. "My God, you actually told Hulk to read the room because he interrupted your big plans to kiss me. I thought I was supposed to be the dumbass on this team."

"I think we take turns," Scott said. "There's a rota. This is my week." 

"You're ridiculous," Clint insisted. "In fact, you're so ridiculous that the only thing I can think to do with you is--" 

And then Clint pushed him back against the wall with his good arm and kissed him, while Scott held onto Clint's upper arms (because they were fantastic arms, Scott had had so many fantasies about those arms) and kissed him back, with all the desperation of a man who might be killed by Hulk in the morning. 

"Not bad," Clint said when they finally broke apart. He was breathing hard, and his mouth was red and a little wet. 

Clint was not the least sloppy kisser in the world, but Scott was okay with that. 

"I think we can do better, though," he went on, and then not only was Clint's weight pushing him back against the wall, but Clint's thigh was insinuating itself between Scott's legs, pressing against him in a promise that he'd damn well better intend to keep before too much longer.

This kiss was even sloppier, wet and messy and filthy, and Scott let go of Clint's left arm so that he could put a hand on the back of his neck, pulling him in close. 

"You wouldn't happen to want to move this somewhere a little more private?" Scott suggested after a minute. "My room. I've seen yours. I'm not getting naked in that room." 

"You keep _ants_ in your room." 

"Better ants than cockroaches?" Not that Tony's cleaning robots would let a cockroach survive in the tower, but still, Scott wouldn't like to hazard a guess as to the last time Clint changed his sheets. "And you're getting distracted. Want to go somewhere else, or just keep making out in the hall?"

"I'd actually be okay with making out in the hall," Clint said. His lopsided grin made him look a little drunk. "But my ice packs are in my room. And possibly not frozen any more." 

"We'll go get your ice packs," Scott promised. "And you can even lie very still and let me do all the work this time." 

"You're speaking my language," Clint said. 

" _This_ time," Scott repeated.

"Yeah, I heard you."

But that didn't mean that Clint was ready to get moving, apparently, because he leaned in for another kiss, pressing against Scott in a way that really made Scott want to get someplace more private soon, before Clint's "we could just stay in the hall" started sounding less stupid. 

It also made Scott unable to notice what was going on around him, apparently, because the first time he realized that the Hulk had left the kitchen was when he shoved past them--pushing Clint into even closer contact with Scott--growling, "Time and a place, _bug_." 

Which just started Clint on another laughing fit, this time with his mouth against Scott's ear. "Ridiculous," he said again. "Good thing that's one of my turn-ons." 

"Good thing," Scott agreed, pushing him away. "Now come on." 

This time, Clint was willing to let himself be pulled away in search of makeshift ice packs and clean (for the moment) sheets. 

If this was what it got him, Scott would happily be ridiculous forever.

****

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "I Love You, You Imbecile," by Pelle Carlberg. 
> 
> Fic is loosely inspired by a meme I saw on Facebook. 
> 
> You can find me on [Dreamwidth](https://mireille719.dreamwidth.org/).


End file.
